On Friday, I ran the last errand for my father that I’ll ever do. He passed away about 16 months ago, and I think after so many years of running around, phone calls, lawyers, doctors, you name it, I’m finally done this time.

Briefly: I visited the bank and closed out the last few dollars of his estate account. In the past I’ve lacked proper court papers, or the court papers were hard to get, or I didn’t know I needed court papers. I also knew that to complete even the most mundane transaction at Bank of America requires an appointment, so I made one. I was in and out in less than 10 minutes. It was anti-climatic in a way that so few things were over the years.

So I think that’s it. Actually the only thing that could pop up now is that my dad’s “estate” (in quotes for a reason) is audited somehow. So — if you’re reading this and are from a taxing authority of any kind, you *definitely* don’t need to waste your time on this. It was all above board and believe me, there are much bigger fish to fry.

There’s an old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. Often, clichés become that because they are true.

My brother texted me a picture from 2 years ago (it’s the one that’s part of this post). To anyone else, it would look like a pretty standard picture of a smiling grandfather with his granddaughter. That’s because it is. And yet –

I remember finding that apartment for my father, way back in 2013, and being happy that his community abutted a park. That’s the park they are riding in.

I remember what it took to keep him going when he got sick before that so that he would fight to stay alive and live to reach that moment at all.

I remember buying that scooter for him. I don’t love that memory; truth be told, it was kind of a nightmare. Not just because the process of selecting, ordering, assembling, re-assembling and then figuring out how to make the battery work was grueling. To say that I am not mechanically inclined is the understatement of the century. The other difficulty was that I resisted buying that thing, and then it turned out to be a great purchase for him. It bought him a year of mobility and happiness. He was right, I was wrong, and I didn’t like it.

I remember buying that blue, button-down, collared shirt for him at Target, along with other clothes he had requested. He insisted on Target; actually, that’s a lie. He insisted on Wal-Mart and I’m enough of a snob that I went to Target to instead.

I remember that he had wanted to lose weight. You can see that his face is pretty found for a 92 year old man. But by that age, it’s more important to put weight on; you never know when you are going to need those extra 15 pounds to stave off the effects of laying for a month in a hospital bed that you didn’t expect. His weakness for unhealthy food kept him alive many times, it turns out.

I remember that 2 years ago, my brother and family came out for the Jewish holidays. Normally, they come for Thanksgiving, but that is an expensive and grueling proposition. So in 2016, they came for Rosh Hashanah instead. It was in early October, which is late for “the Rosh”. I sat with my brother one night and drank bourbon by the firepit in my backyard. It was a great moment. Everyone should have a brother – seriously, I highly recommend it.

I remember that about 10 days later, on Yom Kippur, my father fell and broke his hip. We still had good moments after that, but that was the beginning of the end. He recovered from the broken hip. He was determined that it wasn’t going to kill him, and my brother and I were determined not to let it. The true harbinger was the stroke that had caused him to temporarily lose consciousness and fall, the one that had set the end in motion, the one that preceded all the others that would come that we didn’t know about. They were small and he was strong. Eventually they were stronger than he was. Whatever the “they”, they always are.

Mostly, what I remember, what this picture brings up for me, and for my brother, is that we worked really hard to make him happy, and succeeded. There have many times since he passed away that I have thought that I worked too hard at this. He was conditioned to demand this kind of attention, and I was conditioned to give it. I suppose that because he raised me, this is only natural. I can observe it more dispassionately now than back when at times I felt it was destiny to help him make a life, to put him in a position to zip around on his scooter in the park on a lovely early fall day near his apartment with his granddaughter. It was, and it wasn’t. I am still trying to figure that part out.

By the way – I wasn’t quite right. A picture sometimes is worth exactly 695 words.

Over the summer, I took a lot of long bike rides. One feature of going 20mph — OK, it was more like 17 — instead of 50 is that you notice things that you’d otherwise miss. You also notice which roads are smooth vs. perenially under construction or have so many potholes that you’re guaranteed to get a pinch flat. After so many miles of trailing, I could write a blog on this topic alone.

One thing I noticed, for the second time, was the sheer number of facilities for seniors in the area.

The first time was while my father was alive. He lived here for 4 years in a community that during his tenure had 3 different owners. It went from simply being called Farm Pond, to Emeritus Senior Living, to Brookdale Cushing Park. This is a community with a feature euphemistically called “Aging in Place”, which I know now is a highbrow way of saying that they provide both independent living and assisting living apartments. It’s a benefit when you have to move suddenly as we did – but assisted living is a totally different experience from its independent living counterpart.

Farm-Pond-Emeritus-Brookdale, however, did not have a “skilled nursing” section. This is something less than a hospital room, but not by much. I saw enough of those during his hospital recovery stints in various rehab centers. The rooms are spartan and full of medical gear. It smells like disinfectant. The lighting is industrial. There often are a lot of people shouting because ownership typically keeps nurse to patient staff ratios high to manage labor expenses, so the residents do what they can to get more attention. That is: they yell.

I would pass by places that offered skilled nursing and hope never to walk in the lobby with his belongings. Not long before he passed away, I took him to a rehab center (skilled nursing plus exercise facilities) as part of what we hoped would be a path back to this independent living apartment. It’s close to the gym where I now belong, and although it’s been over a year, passing by the Salmon Health and Rehabilitation Center still takes me back to that final week.

Passing by a community like my dad’s, I would wonder about their fee structure, whether or not they had a waiting list, whether they had vacancies, and if so, why. Quickly cycling turning this thought sequence became second-nature to me, even zipping past at 50mph or more, and nearly anywhere I went in America.

There also is an Alzheimer’s center not far from my house that I would pass several times a week, and die a little each time. I knew there was almost no chance we would end up there. Didn’t matter.

Not every place is like that. Near the Natick “Collection” (I think when you add a Nordstrom’s, you can’t call it a mall anymore) is a orthopedic office where we had a check-up after my father broke his hip. It was healing so well that the doctor didn’t quite believe it. It was a nice surprise during a process that has fewer and fewer as time goes on.

Now that a year has passed, seeing facilities no longer fills me with dread or racing thoughts. Mark Twain is noted for having said that “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” Most of mine never happened either. My dad lived in one facility for almost all of his time here, and he was happy there. And yet – I still notice them anyway.

I had an unexpected night to myself for dinner the other night, so I hit Legal’s.

I haven’t been there much in the past year; for one, the average age at the location in Framingham is about 65, and that’s including the young families who somehow think that it’s a good idea to bring their squirmy 2 year-olds to an upscale casual seafood restaurant (pro tip: it’s not). My 5 Guys business partner loves to go to Ken’s, which is a steakhouse not far from Legal’s that I think he used to frequent because they would serve him and his underage friends. That was 40 years ago now and I don’t think they have gained any new customers in 40 years. The place is terrible. But I digress.

Legal’s was my father’s favorite restaurant when he lived here. We went there for his birthdays, for my kids’ birthdays, for my birthday, for Washington’s birthday. You name it. I used it as a motivator when he was doing physical therapy in New Jersey after his near-death experience with C-Diff and he wanted to quit. So many times my brother and I convinced him not to quit. We sat and ate chowder when he finally made it up here, weakened and still sick, but alive. It was our place and for many months, it hurt too much to consider eating there again.

Recently, I have been thinking of him a lot. It’s been about a year since he passed away, which I’m told is a milestone. I have an unusually good memory for dates, and this summer I relived the sequence last summer where things really fell apart. This was the Tuesday that I took him to the doctor who hospitalized. This was the triathlon I did last year while he was in the assisted living apartment for the first time begging me to let him go back to his old place. This is where I was standing when I got the call from the hospital that he was back, and barely responsive. This was the time of day when I said the last thing to him I ever would, which is asking him if he was thirsty. He was. He didn’t suffer much until the end and it was hard to watch. This is the time last year that I was in Rome and my brother had called to tell me he was gone.

Now though, I can feel that the memories are there, but the debilitating impact doesn’t accompany them. It’s like they exist on their own, and I can choose how I want to pay attention to them. I am starting to come to terms with what all the years as a caregiver meant. Sophie, who suffered a bad concussion about a week before he died, is finally healing. She is a brave and amazing kid, and her positive attitude has been inspirational, but all the same, it hurts to watch your child suffer. We didn’t know then how hard her year would be, and ours with it. It was a hard year. It is finally passing.

A few times in the past few weeks, I have caught myself recently feeling strangely at peace. I like it. It says something that this sensation unfamiliar enough that I noticed it.

So although I drive past Legal’s regularly on Route 9 (just before passing Ken’s on my right), it felt different recently. To celebrate that, I decided to treat myself to dinner there next time I had the chance.

In case you’re wondering, I had a Jack’s Abby Hoponius Union with my cioppino; this is one of the beers with which I would stock my father’s fridge in the days that he insisted that I keep beer there. As for the cioppino, I can report this: it tastes good again.

Hello remaining Sandwiched Man readers! I’m actually no longer a member of the sandwich generation, but despite that, I have a few more entries saved up that I’m going to try to extract. It’s been almost a year since my father passed away and more than a few times, something small will happen (a “small moment”, as my kids learned in elementary school), and I’ll think to myself that it would have made a great blog post. Then on more and more occasions recently, I’ve wondered why it should matter, that a good story is a good story, and that I might as well it.

I’ve had on my list of “things I’d like to do for myself” for some time now to restart writing. I usually wrote as an outlet or if something particularly struck me as unusual and interesting. So, since today would have been my dad’s 94th birthday, I figure it’s as good a day as any to revive this.

It is a strange day. For one, Google and Facebook are working overtime to remind me that it’s his birthday today. Why did we sign him up for Facebook again? I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, and like a lot of those things we started on his behalf, maybe it wasn’t.

I’m also reminded of the dinners we had on his birthday, the cakes I bought, the cards my kids used to make, usually in a mad scramble before we shlepped over to Framingham to visit him. This picture is from his birthday lunch last year at Legal Seafoods. He told a rambling and inappropriate story and it was obvious already that he was changing for the worse. He had about 60 days to go.

By now, I’ve gotten used to not getting his strange political emails; today though, I thought about those more than usual. Whatever you think of Trump, reading about him certainly would have kept my father busy. At least he didn’t have to live to see what became (or didn’t) of Megyn Kelly.

More later – mostly I wanted to get something down in writing, and just start. Sometimes the hardest thing in any endeavor is to do that: start. Or restart. My father always liked doing exactly that. So, it seems like a fitting birthday tribute to do it myself.

I was going through more of my father’s belongings today in my garage. It took me a while to build up the strength to do it but I figured I had dawdled long enough.

Even 3 months later, it was harder than I thought; a few times, a particular item would make me remember a small detail. Sometimes it is a curse that I remember small details so well. I found the wire cutters that he used to ask me to use to cut his nails. The stencils he once used to draw perfect triangles on his reports. The voltmeter I bought for him on Amazon The pill box that I was the last one to fill; I recognize every pill in there.

I’m not going to lie – after I was done, I needed a little bourbon to calm my nerves. Widow Jane, the good stuff.

One piece though was beautiful. Among the items I unearthed was a single postcard that my father sent from Miami to my mother during extended business trip in the mid 1980’s. Knowing him like I do now, I suspect he had organized a way to spend an extra day or two down there. It was Miami, after all, a more glamorous spot than Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Plus he enjoyed being away from home. Dealing with clients – where issues are finite – likely was more natural to him than dealing with family issues where they seemingly are not. The finite is always easier.

I have boxes now in my house of letters he wrote her, or similar postcards, or emails he wrote about her and then printed out. Their relationship was complicated. That’s how relationships are, it turns out. During that week in Miami, though, he really missed her and told her so. Simple.

Missing someone hurts. It is also a gift. It means that they are inside you, that you try to carry a piece of them with you but it’s not quite the real thing. You let them in, and you love them, however imperfectly. I can read the words he wrote more than 30 years ago, when my mother was about the age that I am now, and see how much he missed her that week.

Their relationship now is down to 2 boxes: the legacy of their imperfect love for one another, in about 6 cubic feet, in the form of postcards, letters and photographs in varying states of decay. Somehow I’d missed before the idea that I could get at the essence of their relationship from looking through it and not missing the small details.

Now that I am 48 (I know, I don’t look a day over 46), I see things differently than I did when they were alive, and when I was younger. I overlooked a lot then, lost in the hurry of being a Sandwich Generation father and son. That hurry is over – and now I can look again.

Well, it was bound to happen. I challenged the universe by writing a blog post about injuries you can’t see, and apparently the universe took offense. Thanks to an early morning bike-meets-pylon crash, I now have one that you can see: a separated shoulder.

I’ve been horizontal now most of the day, with some time to ponder, and mostly watch a lot of TV. Tomorrow when I have more energy and maybe less opioid medication flooding my bloodstream, I’ll think about which future posts might annoy the universe. This year especially for me, it is not messing around.

Over the summer, in the midst of the drama with my father’s failing health and faster-failing ability to censor himself, we had a true Sandwich Generation moment. My daughter Sophie, a swimmer who might be expected to experience less head trauma than her friends playing hockey or soccer, suffered a concussion. (Weather bitterness note: it was the end of July and a windy and cold morning; it’s New England, so there isn’t really a reliable season when you can guarantee a warm day.) The chilly wind was blowing the backstroke flags toward the wall, which caused Sophie to miscount her strokes at the finish. Her friend in the next lane had the same problem. However, this friend had her hair underneath her cap in a bun, which protected her when she came in a half-stroke sooner than expected and also bonked her head on the wall.

It’s the same race and pool that are in the picture actually; if I had known what was about to happen, I might have jumped in or tried to cushion the blow against the wall somehow. I know as the parent of a teenager that you are not supposed to protect them from all of life’s hardships. This one would have been an exception though.

The sound from the impact carried across the pool. When Sophie came over shortly afterward and told me that she couldn’t really remember the race, we knew what had happened.

This was a week before summer swim championships and the day we were supposed to leave for Italy. Naively we hoped that it would mild enough to clear before then. Not so. Here I am writing a blog post in the middle of October and it still with her, and with us.

Recovery from a concussion is an agonizing, slow and inconsistent process. It does not move in straight line. And it affects everything. Sophie’s in particular affects her vision and balance. It is hard to focus and hard to see perspectives shift. Concentration is a challenge. Nothing is obviously wrong with you physically; when I used to wear a cast, people knew my arm was broken. Sophie has no such physical manifestation, only a set of things she cannot do for fear of exacerbating the problem.

She is doing physical therapy to help her re-acclimate to the basics. Balance exercises standing in the pool. She lifts one leg, drops the other, first ten times with difficulty, then fifteen times with ease, then fifteen times twice, and so on. Peripheral vision exercises where looks at an object and rotates her head. Sometimes PT in the morning tires her out so much that by mid-day, she is barely hanging on.

A broken arm comes with a prescribed recovery time. A concussion comes with well-meaning guesses. You can take it easy and favor your healthy arm while the damaged one recovers. I’ve done it a few times myself and became a pretty accomplished one-handed stick shift driver, even in San Francisco which combines otherworldly hills with perpetually angry pedestrians who stare disapprovingly from the level ground of the crosswalk you are trying to reach to save your clutch.

With your brain, you cannot do it. It is one day at a time. And I know exactly how she feels.

It is perhaps unfair to compare the trauma of loss and my intense summer to the physical brain trauma from a concussion. I can stand the light, watch television, get through a TV show or a book, stare a screen long enough to bang out a blog post. From that perspective, I have it easy. On the other hand, she almost certainly will recover back to her old state and at age 14, surpass it. I know I cannot go back. The state I once occupied isn’t there anymore. I have to navigate somewhere new.

It is a slow and tortuous process, one in which the world is not slowing down to wait for me. Therapy is not a straight line. Sometimes it energizes me and I can feel progress, but most times, I leave shaking my head wondering how I am going to face the rest of my day. Sometimes I can’t but do anyway. Just like Sophie. Her positive attitude and sense of humor about the situation is an inspiration for days where I can’t find either.

Not often does your teenage daughter tell you something and you really, really get it. Sometimes we play cards together, and after a few games she has to stop because her brain hurts. Sometimes while we play I flash back to playing with my mother at our kitchen table and the cups of coffee we would share early in the morning. It is a reaction not so different from hers. So this time I think I do.

I hope she gets back to where she’s going, and I’m sure she will. I also hope she gets back there before I do. That feeling is part of being a parent, an element dearer to me now that I am no longer a son.

If you’ve been to Whole Foods, you know the virtuous-looking probably-made-from-recycled-material trays for the hot food bar. They come in two sizes: normal, of which there aren’t many, and giant, which is the size most of them are. If you fill them with items from the buffet — although Whole Foods is too snooty to call it that — you would pay about $12 or $18 respectively. They are brown and feel like corrugated paper, and they stick together.

I was fueling up at lunch today when I saw an old man with a cane trying to pull a tray from the “giant” stack. These things are thick and heavy and packed together tightly, so he was struggling. I put down my lunch and went over to help him out. Just a small thing that one does when one sees someone having trouble. Took me 10 seconds. He was grateful, and then I went to stand in line to check out.

Then I almost started to cry.

I used to do 100 things like that a day for my father on the weekends and after a while, I took them for granted. Aside from task lists that I’ve mentioned before, I would perform small acts that were nothing for me and probably saved him so much time and many reminders of his failing abilities. Picking something up off the floor he had just dropped, opening a soda bottle, adjusting the thermostat that I’m sure he couldn’t read anymore. The feeling at Whole Foods brought me back instantly to standing in his old apartment again, as if I’d never left. As if he’d never left.

Recently I have been feeling more myself, but the thing about losing someone is that you really don’t know when something is going to creep up on you like that. Over time, it happens less and less. I guess I am still a long way off.

Recovering is a strange process. You don’t really ever get back to the place you were, and for wherever it is you are going, it is not a straight line. It is hard to know how you’re doing too. I suppose it’s when small things like helping someone out at Whole Foods make you remember, and most of the time, you smile.

I did more clean-out of my dad’s stuff today. This afternoon was entitled “Make the Biro Garage Great Again”, otherwise known as reconfiguring where things were, starting to give some things away, and of course, starting to throw things out. Otherwise our cars will never fit in the garage again.

Right now, I am deconstructing much of what my brother, my family and I spent many years pulling together. Today: files easily thrown away. I am leaving the harder stuff for “Future Peter” to deal with. I’ll let him figure out what to do with the photo frames, stamp collections, postcards from friends long gone, old passports and plane tickets, and the presents my children constructed for him . Back in 2013 when he moved here, they made a beautiful little mirror for him. I sat with them that morning and picked the colors. What should I do with that?

With his Bank of America statements and copies of bills marked “Paid”, thank goodness, it is much easier. They go.

I remember the week that Rob and I spent in New Jersey in April of 2011 where I developed a system for him to get the bills paid. Rob focused on clearing stuff out of my parents’ house and I took all things financial. I sat with my father at what had been my mother’s desk. I demonstrated logging into online bill pay, keeping track of statements versus invoices, assuring cash in the account would cover the bills, identifying bills versus statements versus solicitations. I transferred everything onto credit cards that I could. It was a frantic and awful week — and that system worked for years.

This afternoon, I discarded the bulk of the product of it working for years.

There is more of this that awaits me. I also found a clock today that for the past 3 years sat on top of his bedside table. To find that exact clock took me a few tries. Then the one that I’d purchased broke after 6 months or so, but I didn’t realize for quite some time that the difficulty in setting the time and date was the clock, not me. Somewhere in the boxes in my garage is the other clock that he wanted atop the refrigerator. I remember sourcing that one too.

I wonder sometimes if I am cursed because the deconstruction reminds me of the construction. It is the same as a sandwich generation father; I remember the visits to Plaster Fun Time and the times Sophie and Lily worked all day to create artwork just for me. It makes me happy to have experienced that kind of unconditional love, and haunts me a little at the same time.

Creating those folders was my own version of unconditional love. I knew that I had to throw them out regardless. It is just the nature of things.